Readers of this blog will be excited to hear that Viewpoint has published a full translation of Ingo Elbe’s Between Marx, Marxism and Marxisms – Ways of Reading Marx’s Theory, which provides an excellent comparative analysis of the Traditional, Western and New German Reading’s of Marx.

“The objec­tive of the fol­low­ing obser­va­tions is to offer a rough overview of cen­tral ways of read­ing Marx’s the­ory. These are to be pre­sented – by means of a few selected top­ics – as Marxisms that can be rel­a­tively clearly delim­ited from one another, and the his­tory of their recep­tion and influ­ence will be eval­u­ated with regard to the common-sense under­stand­ing of “Marx­ist theory.”

A dis­tinc­tion will be made between the hith­erto pre­dom­i­nant inter­pre­ta­tion of Marx, pri­mar­ily asso­ci­ated with polit­i­cal par­ties (tra­di­tional Marx­ism, Marx­ism in the sin­gu­lar, if you will), and the dis­si­dent, crit­i­cal forms of recep­tion of Marx (Marxisms in the plural), with their respec­tive claims of a “return to Marx.” The first inter­pre­ta­tion is under­stood as a prod­uct and process of a restricted read­ing of Marx, in part emerg­ing from the “exo­teric” layer of Marx’s work, which updates tra­di­tional par­a­digms in polit­i­cal econ­omy, the the­ory of his­tory, and phi­los­o­phy. Sys­tem­atized and ele­vated to a doc­trine by Engels, Kaut­sky, et al, it suc­cumbs to the mys­ti­fi­ca­tions of the cap­i­tal­ist mode of pro­duc­tion and cul­mi­nates in the apolo­getic sci­ence of Marxism-Leninism. The other two inter­pre­ta­tions, specif­i­cally West­ern Marx­ism as well as the Ger­man neue Marx-Lektüre (“new read­ing of Marx”), usu­ally explore the “eso­teric” con­tent of Marx’s cri­tique and analy­sis of soci­ety, often con­sum­mated out­side of insti­tu­tion­al­ized, cumu­la­tive research pro­grams, by iso­lated actors in the style of an “under­ground Marxism.”